Why do we call people expats and not rich migrants or something like that?
Expat == anglo work migrant
Leaving China
91–100 of 686 posts
Re: Leaving China
#92I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…
>Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy.
A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s.
Re: Leaving China
#93It's so interesting to read this perspective since it drives home "the grass is always greener.." for me. I've lived a pretty charmed life in the US for the past few years (like the majority of HN, I imagine) but I find myself longing to move to a country with dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens and China fits the bill pretty g…
In 2014 I worked with a company in Beijing for a few weeks. The local engineers all had pretty long and packed subway commutes from various outer developments, so my first guess would be that "affordable housing in the city center" is long gone for most major cities. The surface-level infrastructure was interesting, it felt like Los Angeles - much more than it did Manhattan or SF aboveground - just blown up 3-to-5x.…
+1, at least anecdotally, at least in T1 cities: I spent a few months in Shanghai for work in 2018 and all of my local colleagues had messed up housing situations of one flavor or another. One guy lived alone in a shoebox but when he had a free weekend, he'd take the train ~2h out to a smaller city where his family lived in a decent house. There were also a lot of complaints about apartment quality even/especially in new construction.
The drive from central-ish Shanghai (Wujiaochang) to PVG was mindblowing because of the scale and frequency of the apartment megablocks ringing the city: identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower, lining the wide (but at the time oddly empty) thoroughfares. Felt like an alt opening scene to a Judge Dredd movie.
Re: Leaving China
#94What I find ironic is that as businesses leave China, they move into the exact same type of culture in Vietnam and India. Vietnam is basically a mini China and India is trending towards the same authoritarian regime that most people find distasteful. The entire western world is so addicted to cheap labor I don't know what would happen when there is no more cheap labor to be found. There will be a huge social disrupti…
>"The entire western world is so addicted to cheap labor "
This is the only thing that allows rich to get richer while still keeping peasants under the boiling point. Without cheap labor living standard in developed countries would drop like a rock. What comes after nobody knows.
Re: Leaving China
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not an expat, but I was considering spending several months in China. After Hong Kong, there was a strong message of "Americans caused this," likewise after covid there was a strong message of "this didn't start in China, this actually started in America." It wasn't just a message of "America is our enemy," but looking at how the People in Hong Kong were robbed of due process from an impartial justice system it…
> "this didn't start in China, this actually started in America." How did the reasoning work here? Not sure if this speaks to poor education, propaganda, something else, or all of the above.
There's a conspiracy theory propagated in China that Covid was a biological weapon spread in Wuhan by Americans visiting during an international sporting event in late 2019.
Re: Leaving China
#96It's so interesting to read this perspective since it drives home "the grass is always greener.." for me. I've lived a pretty charmed life in the US for the past few years (like the majority of HN, I imagine) but I find myself longing to move to a country with dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens and China fits the bill pretty g…
Serious question, if you have to sacrifice personal freedom, what does the great society look like you are willing to sacrifice it for? What freedoms are you willing to give up for what societal benefit? I’m genuinely curious because every person defines personal freedom differently. And great society is very subjective.
Some are selling their freedom quite cheap. It's really nothing new/hard to imagine.
Re: Leaving China
#97I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…
Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.
Re: Leaving China
#98Re: Leaving China
#99I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…
> Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
So it's still a bastion of democracy?
Re: Leaving China
#100I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…
> Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
> A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s.
The 1990s being, well, not now, the correct conjugation is either “was” or “had been”, not “has been”.
Which relates directly to why its irrelevant.